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Everything hurts.
It’s the first sensation that returns, the pain, as if I’ve clawed my way out of a cement tomb using nothing but grit and a toothpick. My eyes, even behind closed lids, have been dipped in acid, and my muscles tense to the point of snapping.
A car horn honks somewhere in the distance, followed by the monotonous scream of road rage, coming from two different voices, but both blending together.
I try to rub my eyes and come up short, a line of fire across my wrist keeping me in place.
“Don’t even try.” Blake’s voice is a harsh whip, lashing at me. I slowly drag my eyes open, the blur receding as I focus on a line of white silk dotted with bright red and orange poppies.
I’m…home. In my own apartment.
I’m lying on my stomach, my arms and legs lashed together behind me, and my cheek pressed to the carpet.
“The first thing Uncle Broderick taught me was to tie a knot strong enough to keep a wild animal from breaking loose.” Blake’s feet swim into view slowly, the soles and leather black. “And I’ve had years of practice to get it right. The harder you struggle, the tighter the knot will go until it cuts off your circulation.”
I try to crane my head to twist around and look up at him, but agony shoots from the bottom of my skull all the way down my spine until I feel the ache in my hips.
“He used to take me into the woods to practice. First on animals. We’d set traps and use whatever we caught. Then on people,” Blake continues. He looks exactly the same as when I last saw him, same hair that is no color, same bland and slightly bored expression. Instead of a Bluetooth headset, he holds a tactical knife with a serrated blade.
The same kind used on my men. The realization hits some distant portion of my mind, and although logically it’s not clicking, my body reacts viscerally.
“Wh—” I try to speak and cough, choking on my own spit.
Whatever drug he’d used on the cloth is still in my system. I’m struggling to move my fingers.And I don’t need to test the knots to know Blake is telling the truth. They’re tight enough to strain my knees and joints without putting too much pressure on me. Yet.
Give it time, and the position will be unbearably uncomfortable.
He reaches for my chin and yanks, turning my neck in an unnatural way to force me to meet his gaze. “Darkling.”
There is only my name, only those two syllables, and no other warning before he presses the tip of the blade in his opposite hand to my shoulder. It slides through my skin, cutting through muscle and tendon before the tip touches my bone, and I scream.
“I know you like pain,” he continues. He drags the knife up, cutting a design through my skin. “My uncle used to tell me about it, what he’d do to you. The things he’d have to do to make you come. I like pain, too.”
“Blake, stop!”
The words drop off into an endless scream. His uncle. The fuckers were related, and I never knew.
I bought this apartment for a reason, years ago. Once I had the money to make something like this for myself. I’ve got the entire top floor of one of the oldest brownstones in the city. There are only two other apartments, and right now, the first floor is unoccupied. The woman in the basement wears hearing aids, and this time of night, she’s got them out and turned off.
There is no one around to hear me.
No one is going to come looking for me. Exactly as Blake must have planned.
He stops the knife at a point above my spine, in the middle of my back.
“It’s okay,” he croons. He kicks me onto my side, the open, flawed skin on my back screaming when it comes into contact with my rope-bound wrists and ankles. “It’s all going to be okay.”
“Why are you doing this?” Tears have made their way to my eyes, down my cheeks. “Blake, we’ve been friends.”
“We’ve been competitors,” he corrects. “I always thought the job of Broderick’s right hand would be mine until he found you. The position was supposed to be mine, but instead, he kept me underfoot, a glorified assistant, as you’ve called me so. Many. Times!” He laughs loudly, his mouth wide open.
“I’ve never doneanythingto you,” I sob.
“We’ve been competing to be the best, to see which one of us could impress Uncle Broderick more. I hate to break it to you, Aria, but the contest…you’ve never had a chance of winning. So you took him out.”
“I had nothing…I didn’t…”
The way he’s looking at me, there’s no chance he’ll buy my lies. Not now. He knows. He knows everything, and he’s been playing me from the start.
